Thursday Reads
Posted: April 14, 2011 Filed under: Crime, Medicare, morning reads, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics, Violence against women | Tags: Bill Donohue, earthquakes, FAA, Gallup poll, global warming, James Inhofe, Long Island serial killer, medicare, morning news, Republicans, seniors, sexual abuse, Yellowstone supervolcano 18 Comments
Good Morning!! I have a real grab bag of news items for you this morning.
Via Ezra Klein, a Gallup poll found that nobody, including most Republicans, wants the government fooling around with Medicare. I can’t embed the chart, but you can see it at either of the above links. Klein:
The Republican Party has a bit of a problem: Their coalition is heavily weighted toward seniors. But their agenda is heavily weighted toward cuts to entitlement programs that benefit seniors. In 2010, they handled this by relentlessly attacking Democrats for the Medicare cuts in the Affordable Care Act. In 2011, they’re trying to handle it by saying that Paul Ryan’s Medicare cuts will exempt anyone under 55 — but because he’s keeping all the Medicare cuts from the Affordable Care Act and implementing them on schedule, that isn’t, by the GOP’s own logic, actually true….
The most popular position in the GOP’s coalition isn’t that Medicare needs a complete overhaul, as Ryan thinks. It isn’t that it needs major changes, or even that it needs minor changes. It’s that we shouldn’t try and control costs at all.
ROFLOL!
Speaking of arrogant and deluded Republicans, The Smoking Gun obtained FAA documents relating to an incident in which James Inhofe “scared the crap out of” a bunch of Airport employees when the elderly GOP Senator landed his plan on a closed runway.
Newly released Federal Aviation Administration documents and audiotapes shed a scary new light on a bizarre incident late last year during which U.S. Senator James Inhofe landed his Cessna on a closed runway at a south Texas airport, scattering construction workers who ran for their lives as the politician’s plane hopscotched over them and six vehicles.
The FAA material, provided in response to a TSG Freedom of Information Act request, details how Inhofe, 76, chose to land on the main runway at the Cameron County Airport on October 21 despite being aware that it was closed and had a large ‘X’ on its threshold….
Shortly after Inhofe landed, Sidney Boyd, who was supervising construction on the closed runway, called the FAA to report that Inhofe’s plane, a twin-engine six-seater, initially touched down on the runway and then “’sky hopped’ over the six vehicles and personnel working on the runway, and then landed.”
During the call, which was recorded by the FAA, Boyd said Inhofe’s antics “scared the crap out of” workers, adding that the Cessna “damn near hit” a red truck. Referring to the vehicle’s driver, Boyd added, “I think he actually wet his britches, he was scared to death. I mean, hell, he started trying to head for the side of the runway. The pilot could see him, or he should have been able to, he was right on him.”
Inhofe agreed to “complete a program of remedial training” so he wouldn’t lose his pilot’s license.
According to a report by the Senate Permanent Committee on Investigations, released today, Goldman Sachs “Misled Clients, Lawmakers on CDOs.”
Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) designed, marketed and sold collateralized debt obligations that misled investors and created conflicts of interest as the company built short positions before the U.S. housing market collapsed, a Senate panel said in its report on the financial crisis.
In the case of one CDO, Hudson Mezzanine Funding 2006-1, Goldman Sachs told investors its interests were aligned with theirs while the firm held 100 percent of the short side, according to the report released today by the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Senator Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who leads the panel, urged regulators to review all of the structured finance transactions described in the report.
At a briefing today, Levin said he believed Goldman Sachs executives weren’t truthful about the company’s transactions in testimony before the subcommittee at an April 2010 hearing. He said he would refer the testimony to the Justice Department for possible perjury charges.
Good. I sure would like to see some prosecutions of these lying, cheating frauds.
Via Tennesee Guerrilla Women, Ashley Judd is “speaking out against misogyny.” She wrote a couple of paragraphs in her new memoir about rap artists promoting hatred and violence against women:
While speaking about an AIDS awareness program she works with, Judd writes, “Along with other performers, YouthAIDS was supported by rap and hip-hop artists like Snoop Dogg and P. Diddy to spread the message…um, who? Those names were a red flag.”
Judd continued, “As far as I’m concerned, most rap and hip-hop music – with its rape culture and insanely abusive lyrics and depictions of girls and women as ‘ho’s’ – is the contemporary soundtrack of misogyny.”
She concludes, “I believe that the social construction of gender – the cultural beliefs and practices that divide the sexes and institutionalize and normalize the unequal treatment of girls and women, privilege the interests of boys and men, and, most nefariously, incessantly sexualize girls and women – is the root cause of poverty and suffering around the world.”
The backlash was immediate and vicious, and included death threats. Judd apologized for generalizing about all rap and hip hop music, but ended with this:
“Hatred of girls and women, I will oppose with spiritual and non-violent principles every day,” she concludes, adding that the Twitter responses to her remarks included death threats. “Abuse and violence in any form, at any time, in any expression, are never okay. Period. I, and other girls and women, are not afraid of you. You can keep on hating, but I am going to keep on loving.”
More power to Ashley Judd!
In more violence against women news, the search for bodies is continuing on Long Island. After finding ten bodies so far on beaches, searchers are looking underwater for more remains. In addition the FBI is helping out with “high-tech planes.”
“This is not an episode of CSI. This is an intensive long term investigation that includes the use of sophisticated technology as well as good old fashioned detective work,” said Suffolk County Police Commissioner Richard Dormer at a press conference today.
Dormer said that the FBI will provide investigators with planes and choppers that use sophisticated aerial imaging technology of the Long Island beach area where the skeletal remains of at least nine bodies have been found so far.
“Weather permitting this operation will commence later this week…We’re hoping the technology will help identify skeletal remains that may still be out there,” Dormer said.
Police believe that there are no links between the bodies found on Long Island in 2010 and 2011 and four bodies that were found in Atlantic City in 2006.
According to the NY Post, some of the bones found in the past couple of days could be victims of another Long Island serial killer Joel Rifkin.
The skull and torso found on a desolate Nassau County beachfront are too old to be connected to the serial killings of four Craigslist call girls — and could belong to long-lost victims of notorious Long Island butcher Joel Rifkin, a source said yesterday.
“These are so old that roots were growing around the vertebrae and the skull,” the source told The Post.
“These could be one or two of Joel Rifkin’s victims who were never found,” or the work of another killer, the source said.
Further complicating the case, the bodies of a man and a young child have been found during the search.
Austria is the latest country waking up to the abuse of its children by Catholic priests.
Over 800 cases of abuse in Catholic institutions in Austria have been reported so far, a commission tasked with investigating abuse cases announced on Wednesday.
A total 837 abuse victims approached the commission, which was set up by the Austrian Catholic Church last year after it was hit by a wave of abuse revelations, commission head Waltraud Klasnic told a press conference.
Three quarters of the victims were male, with the most cases — about 20 percent — reported in northern Upper Austria province, followed by Vienna and western Tyrol, according to a commission report summarising its first-year findings.
Back in the good old USA, Bill Donohue of the Catholic League says the kids were asking for it.
The group bought an expensive full-page ad in The New York Times Monday that places the blames for the church’s scandals on “homosexuality, not pedophilia.”
And perhaps most shockingly, it also claimed that some children were active participants in the abuse.
“The refrain that child rape is a reality in the Church is twice wrong: let’s get it straight — they weren’t children and they weren’t raped,” self-appointed Catholic League president Bill Donohue wrote in the ad.
“We know from the John Jay study that most of the victims have been adolescents, and that the most common abuse has been inappropriate touching (inexcusable though this is, it is not rape),” he added, referencing a 2004 study by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, which was funded by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.
“The Boston Globe correctly said of the John Jay report that ‘more than three-quarters of the victims were post pubescent, meaning the abuse did not meet the clinical definition of pedophilia.’ In other words, the issue is homosexuality, not pedophilia,” Donohue wrote.
Another issue is that priests are in a position of power and should not take advantage of that position to gratify their sexual desires. But I’m sure Donohue would disagree. And where I come from adolescents are still children.
In science news, a new study revealed that Climate change affects tectonic plate movement, causing earthquakes
Understanding why plates change direction and speed is key to unlocking huge seismic events such as last month’s Japan earthquake, which shifted the Earth’s axis by several inches, or February’s New Zealand quake.
An Australian-led team of researchers from France and Germany found that the strengthening Indian monsoon had accelerated movement of the Indian plate over the past 10 million years by a factor of about 20 percent.
Lead researcher Giampiero Iaffaldano said Wednesday that although scientists have long known that tectonic movements influence climate by creating new mountains and sea trenches, his study was the first to show the reverse.
Dakninikat sent me this one from the BBC: Yellowstone supervolcano fed by bigger plume
The underground volcanic plume at Yellowstone in the US may be bigger than previously thought, according to a new study by geologists.
The volcanic hotspot below Yellowstone feeds the hot springs, mud pots and geysers that bring millions of visitors to the US national park each year.
There have been three huge eruptions of the Yellowstone supervolcano: 2.1 million years ago, 1.3 million years ago and 640,000 years ago. Two of these eruptions blanketed a large area of North America with volcanic ash.
The most recent full-scale eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano ejected some 1,000 cubic km (240 cubic miles) of hot ash and rock into the atmosphere. There have been smaller eruptions in between the largest outpourings; the most recent of these occurred 70,000 years ago.
Of course that can’t be true because the earth can’t possibly be that old, right?
That’s all I’ve got for today. What are you reading and blogging about?
All Three Branches of Government are Broken
Posted: April 10, 2011 Filed under: Crime, Media, New Orleans, POTUS, Psychopaths in charge, U.S. Politics | Tags: broken government, crime, Death Penalty Information Center, death row, Democrats, executive, Harry Connick Sr., John Thompson, judicial, legislative, murder, New Orleans, racial inequality, Republicans, Supreme Court, The Innocence Project, U.S. Politics 35 Comments
Over the past 2-1/2 years, we’ve seen how broken the executive and legislative branches of the U.S. government are. We have a president who refused to stand up to the minority party while his party had historic majorities in both houses of Congress. Thanks to this president’s weak-kneed fealty to “bi-partisanship” and his predictable willingness to cave to the Republicans on just about any issue, he no longer has a supermajority in Congress.
Blue Texan at FDL makes a very good case for why Obama and the Democrats lost in 2010.
Democrats lost because they lost independents by 15 points, and independents don’t care what liberals think.
So why did Democrats lose independents?
Because the economy hadn’t improved enough because the stimulus bill was inadequate. It didn’t help matters that the Affordable Care Act was stripped of its most popular feature [a public option] or that HAMP was a total failure or that the Democrats punted on immigration and host of other progressive goals — but it was mostly about the economy.
The lesson, then, is…that Democrats need to deliver — especially when they promised CHANGE YOU CAN BELIEVE IN — and when they don’t, they lose elections.
For the past few weeks, we’ve seen the House Republicans and the White House bicker over cutting the budget when what we really need to do is raise taxes on the richest Americans. If Obama had any guts at all, he would have refused to extend the Bush tax cuts period. But, because he’s a lily livered wimp, he caved.
Today, Nicholas Kristof said the Congresspeople are acting like junior high school children.
It’s unclear where the adults are, but they don’t seem to be in Washington. Beyond the malice of the threat to shut down the federal government, averted only at the last minute on Friday night, it’s painful how vapid the discourse is and how incompetent and cowardly our leaders have proved to be.
Kristof doesn’t specifically chide Obama, but come on. If he weren’t so focused on getting “bipartisan support” for every initiative, he could have accomplished much more and gotten more respect from the Republicans at the same time. He was and is still simply too inexperienced to do the job of POTUS.
Tonight I want to put the spotlight on the third branch of government. Our judicial system is broken too. We have an epidemic of wrongful convictions in our justice system, and we have an ultra-right wing majority in the Supreme Court that refuses to do anything about it.
As of February 4, 2011, 250 wrongly convicted people had been exonerated by DNA testing, according to The Innocence Project,
There have been 268 post-conviction DNA exonerations in United States history. These stories are becoming more familiar as more innocent people gain their freedom through postconviction testing. They are not proof, however, that our system is righting itself.
The common themes that run through these cases — from global problems like poverty and racial issues to criminal justice issues like eyewitness misidentification, invalid or improper forensic science, overzealous police and prosecutors and inept defense counsel — cannot be ignored and continue to plague our criminal justice system.
According to the Death Penalty Information Center, more than 130 people have been released from death row because they were exonerated based on evidence that proved they were innocent. The chart below shows those exonerations state by state. The chart comes from a fact sheet (PDF) produced by the Death Penalty Information Center.
I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that about 70% of the people who have been exonerated are members of minority groups–mostly African Americans. One of the most frequent causes of false convictions is prosecutorial misconduct. For more information on this problem, see this report (PDF) by the Innocence Project. In late March, the Supreme Court basically gave carte blanche to dishonest prosecutors by deciding that a wrongfully convicted man who had spent 14 years on death row has no right to sue for damages. From the LA Times:
John Thompson
A bitterly divided Supreme Court on Tuesday tossed out a jury verdict won by a New Orleans man who spent 14 years on death row and came within weeks of execution because prosecutors had hidden a blood test and other evidence that would have proven his innocence.
The 5-4 decision delivered by Justice Clarence Thomas shielded the New Orleans district attorney’s office from being held liable for the mistakes of its prosecutors. The evidence of their misconduct did not prove “deliberate indifference” on the part of then-Dist. Atty. Harry Connick Sr., Thomas said.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg emphasized her disapproval by reading her dissent in the courtroom, saying the court was shielding a city and its prosecutors from “flagrant” misconduct that nearly cost an innocent man his life.
“John Thompson spent 14 years isolated on death row before the truth came to light,” she said. He was innocent of the crimes that sent him to prison and prosecutors had “dishonored” their obligation to present the true facts to the jury, she said.
Besides Justice Ginsburg, Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan also dissented from the majority opinion.
The Supreme Court has consistently shielded prosecutors from accountability for misconduct in the past, but Thompson had sued the New Orleans District Attorney’s office, claiming the office had demonstrated a “pattern of wrongdoing” and had failed to ensure that its attorneys obeyed the law. Now the Supremes have eliminated another check against willful misconduct by prosecutors.
Here from NPR is a brief summary of the case against Thompson:
In December of 1984, Raymond Liuzza Jr., the son of a prominent New Orleans business executive, was shot to death in front of his home. Police, acting on a tip, picked up two men, Kevin Freeman and John Thompson.
Thompson denied knowing anything about the shooting, but Freeman, in exchange for a one-year prison sentence, agreed to testify that he saw Thompson commit the crime.
Prosecutors wanted to seek the death penalty, but Thompson had no record of violent felonies. Then, a citizen saw his photo in the newspaper and implicated him in an attempted carjacking — and prosecutors saw a way to solve their problem. John Hollway, who wrote a book about the case, said the solution was to try the carjacking case first.
A conviction in the carjacking case would yield additional benefits in the subsequent murder trial, Hollway observes. It would discredit Thompson if he took the stand in his own defense at the murder trial, so he didn’t. And the carjacking would be used against him during the punishment phase of the murder trial.
It all worked like a charm. Thompson was convicted of both crimes and sentenced to death for murder.
Harry Connick, Sr.
Ten years later, after Thompson’s appeals were exhausted and he was days from be executed, an investigator for his attorneys found that the blood of the perpetrator had been left at the scene of the murder. The lab report showed that Thompson had a different blood type than the person who committed the crime. The DA had deliberately concealed this information from the defense.
At a new trial, more exculpatory evidence that had been suppressed by the DA was presented–10 pieces of evidence in all–and the jury acquitted Thompson in half-an-hour. Thompson then sued and won a $14 million judgment against Connick and the NOLA DA’s office. But, now the right wingers on the Court have nullified that judgement.
On March 31, the editors of The New York Times wrote that a lack of empathy led to this injustice.
The important thing about empathy that gets overlooked is that it bolsters legal analysis. That is clear in the dissent by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Her empathy for Mr. Thompson as a defendant without means or power is affecting. But it is her understanding of the prosecutors’ brazen ambition to win the case, at all costs, that is key.
After detailing the “flagrant indifference” of the prosecutors to Mr. Thompson’s rights, she makes clear how critically they needed training in their duty to turn over evidence and why “the failure to train amounts to deliberate indifference to the rights” of defendants.
The district attorney, Harry Connick Sr., acknowledged the need for this training but said he had long since “stopped reading law books” so he didn’t understand the duty he was supposed to impart. The result, Justice Ginsburg writes, was an office with “one of the worst” records in America for failing to turn over evidence that “never disciplined or fired a single prosecutor” for a violation.
One thing about conservatives, they rarely show any empathy or compassion for anyone who isn’t just like them.
Today John Thompson himself contributed an op-ed to the NYT. Please read the whole thing, but here is just a bit.
I SPENT 18 years in prison for robbery and murder, 14 of them on death row. I’ve been free since 2003, exonerated after evidence covered up by prosecutors surfaced just weeks before my execution date. Those prosecutors were never punished. Last month, the Supreme Court decided 5-4 to overturn a case I’d won against them and the district attorney who oversaw my case, ruling that they were not liable for the failure to turn over that evidence — which included proof that blood at the robbery scene wasn’t mine.
Because of that, prosecutors are free to do the same thing to someone else today.
[….]
The prosecutors involved in my two cases, from the office of the Orleans Parish district attorney, Harry Connick Sr., helped to cover up 10 separate pieces of evidence. And most of them are still able to practice law today.
Why weren’t they punished for what they did? When the hidden evidence first surfaced, Mr. Connick announced that his office would hold a grand jury investigation. But once it became clear how many people had been involved, he called it off.
According to NPR, former DA Harry Connick Sr. “feels vindicated” by the SCOTUS decision.
“I think that he committed … a murder, and I think that obviously we thought we had enough evidence to gain a conviction,” he says. “So I was delighted that the Supreme Court ruled in our favor.”
Never mind the ten pieces of exculpatory evidence that his prosecutor covered up in order to convict Thompson. And, by the way, the prosecutor confessed what he had done to a friend, so it was no accident. Relatives of the murdered man, Ray Liuzza, still believe Thompson is guilty. Liuzza’s sister
Maurine Liuzza said she has reviewed all of the evidence in the case and still believes that Thompson is guilty.
“Just because you are found not guilty does not make you innocent,” she said.
It’s time for radical change in all three branches of our broken government.
Politically Convenient Terrorism
Posted: January 20, 2011 Filed under: Crime, right wing hate grouups, The Media SUCKS, the villagers, U.S. Politics | Tags: hate groups, Ruby Ridge, Seattle bombing, Waco, White terrorism 12 CommentsEarly into the Tucson massacre, I wrote a post called White Terrorist Apologia. It was based on a statement from a
Click on this picture to go to a short discussion on skinheads. Read the apologia for skinheads there in the comments. Comments like " skin heads have there place in our society" and "Great topic to write about but unfortunately, they pose no real threat to the Country as a whole! "
reader of Juan Cole’s Informed Comment that “pointed out that if a Muslim organization had put out a poster with American politicians in the cross-hairs, and one had gotten shot, there would have been hell to pay”. We had a recent terrorist threat in Spokane with pics just shown in the Seattle Weekly as a “sophisticated and deadly” bomb deposited along a MLK celebratory parade route. Then, we got the silence of the lambs. My guess is that napsack was deposited by the Washington State Hate Group “The American Front Skinheads’ or some such spin off. They’ve done stuff like that before. Here’s a refresher for those of you that don’t remember the early 1990s around the Ruby Ridge Incident and Waco.
In this context, the FBI recorded four incidents of right-wing terrorism between 1990 and April 1996 (when The Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996(1) “AEDPA” was signed into law), including two July 1993 bombings in Washington state, by the American Front Skinheads–one of a gay bar in Seattle and the other of the NAACP headquarters in Tacoma. More generally, from 1989 through 1991, the Justice Department reported that the number of bombing incidents in the United States increased from 1208 to 2499; none were acts of Arab terrorism. In 1993, there were forty-three deaths and over three hundred injuries due to bombings not tied to international terrorist groups.
EmptyWheel picked up on the quiet too and noted that Some Terrorism Scares Are More Useful Than Other Terrorism Scares. Marcy discusses not only how we don’t screech about acts of terrorism most likely committed by right wing groups but that right wing blogs seem complicit in the silence. She cites David Neiwert and his running list of domestic terror attacks that she argues “demonstrates clearly that these are not isolated incidences”. She also points out a very interesting headline at The Philadelphia Inquirer: ‘Has right-wing carping killed media coverage of major “domestic terrorism” case in Spokane’ by Will Bunch.
Which is why I can’t help but wonder if there’s a backstory here related to the past weeks coverage of the assassination attempt on Rep. Giffords, and the right-wing critique of some of that coverage. As you surely recall, the fact that a Democratic congresswoman was targeted in a state that has beeb a bastion of the Tea Party Movement and unrest over issues like illegal immigration provoked a number of articles about political rhetoric on the right — including the fact that Giffords had been mapped with crosshairs in the now famous political mailing by Sarah Palin’s PAC.
Does the pro-gun crowd disown these kinds of militias, own them, or just want them ignored by the MSM so as not to interfere with their spin that only leftist loonies threaten our government? Marcy’s thoughts are pretty clear on the matter.
Because the press almost never covers these domestic terrorism incidents. And, just as importantly, our government doesn’t often (the biggest exception was the Hutaree bust) hold big press conferences to report on such events, partly is because most press conferences are about arrests, not unsolved crimes. Moreover, in spite of Neiwert’s and Bunch’s work, there is not one bogeyman, like al Qaeda, which the press can blame.
And without an easy and convenient bogeyman, terrorism scares don’t serve the same purpose for the press, or the government.
How much of this also has to do with the fact that we really have no real left in this country? We actually have no actual liberals or socialists that really have a voice in media or a major following on the web. All we have is ‘progressives’ and conservatives that aren’t interested in conserving anything but the wealth of the plutocracy. As I pointed out in my January 8 post, even when the FBI and other law enforcement agencies point out these right wing militia groups, the right wing blogosphere and media turns it into an attack on gun rights and veterans. They deliberately miss the point.
This leads me to believe that we’re only subject to concern about terrorists when it’s politically convenient. We can extrapolate terrorism out of building mosques but actually finding bombs along parade routes isn’t so interesting because it doesn’t play into the current political theatre. The current political theatre is what’s cooking on the list of John Boehner and the like. Right now, the list of acceptable terrorist threats include anything that might be linkable to Mexican Drug Cartels, women wanting reproductive care, and Muslims. So, building a mosque is an act of terrorism. Asking a pharmacist for drugs which stop uterine infections is an act of terrorism. Printing signs in both Spanish and English is an act of terrorism. Actually leaving bombs on MLK day parade routes; not interesting.
We need to start calling a lot more people out on this. It’s obvious that most Americans really don’t know what a long and violent history we have with these right wing militia groups. Check out that running list and a similar one I posted on my January 8 thread. These folks are violent, crazy, and well armed. They are already in the country. The press needs to do a better job of providing information on all threats to domestic security even when it doesn’t match with the narrative the right wing wants on gun ownership and anti-federal government memes.
Buried in our newspapers from yesterday:
Yesterday the AP reported an anonymous U.S. official saying it was the most “potentially destructive” device he’d ever seen.
“They haven’t seen anything like this in this country,” the official said. “This was the worst device, and most intentional device, I’ve ever seen.”A bit alarmist, perhaps. But no doubt that this thing exploding on a parade procession would have been horrific.
Oh, and think you’re someplace safe?
Police in Arlington, MA this week seized a “large amount” of weapons and ammunition from local businessman Travis Corcoran after he wrote a blog post threatening U.S. lawmakers in the wake of the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ). In a post on his blog (which has since been removed) titled “1 down and 534 to go” — 1 referring to Giffords and 534 referring to the rest of the House of Representatives and the Senate — Corcoran applauded the shooting of Giffords and justified the assassination of lawmakers because he argued the federal government has grown far beyond its constitutional limits. “It is absolutely, absolutely unacceptable to shoot indiscriminately. Target only politicians and their staff and leave regular citizens alone,” he wrote in the post.
Oh, and this guy wasn’t a Muslim, wasn’t a Mexican, and wasn’t a woman wanting an abortion. He falls into the extreme libertarian anti-government category like his buddies described up top. His tweets indicate he’s a fan of Senator Rand Paul. What will the Drudge Report and the Tea Party say to defend his arsenal and his speech? Just another white guy who loves parts of the first amendment and all of the second?
Update: Description of Corcoran’s Politics from the ThinkProgress post.
Corcoran calls himself “an anarcho-capitalist” and while his blog has been taken down, based on his Twitter page, he appears to hold views similar to those of many in the anti-government libertarian wing of the conservative movement, like many tea party activists. Anarcho-capitalism is a radical subset of libertarianism, and is often referred to as “libertarian-anarchy.” For example, echoing calls from many on the right, Corcoran tweeted, “it is unconstitutional for the Feds to even run a department of education.”
Open Thread: Bizarre Bits of News on the Arizona Shootings
Posted: January 14, 2011 Filed under: Crime, Surreality, U.S. Politics | Tags: Arizona shootings, Jerad Lee Loughner, Pima County Sheriff 57 CommentsAccording to ABC News, the night before his shocking rampage, Jared Loughner tried to develop photos of himself wearing only a g-string and holding his Glock. The photos were turned over to police by a Tucson Walgreens.
The Pima County Sherriff’s Office confirmed to ABC News they had received the photographs from the store and turned them over to the FBI.
The photos, presumably shot in a mirror, show Loughner, 22, posing with the same make of gun he allegedly used in the Jan. 8 shooting. In the photos he holds the pistol against his crotch and buttocks while wearing a bright red thong, sources told ABC News.
The visual I got from that is of Travis Bickel in Taxi Driver talking to himself in the mirror while drawing his guns. What a surreal nightmare this story is!
Have you heard right wingers claiming that if someone had been present at the scene of the shooting who had a gun it could have saved lives? Well, it turns out there was someone like that present, and he almost shot the man who had just disarmed Loughner!
“I carry a gun so I was — I felt like I was a little bit more prepared to do some good and than maybe somebody else would have been,” Joe Zamudio told MSNBC’s Ed Schultz Monday.
“As I came out of the door of the Walgreens, sir, I saw several individuals wrestling with him and I came running. I was already at a full sprint and you know, there’s no time to think about anything,” he explained.
“I saw another individual holding the firearm. I kind of assumed he was the shooter. So I grabbed his wrist and you know told him to drop it and forced him to drop the gun on the ground. When he did that, everybody says, no, no, it’s this guy.”
[….]
…when I came through the door, I had my hand on the butt of my pistol and I clicked the safety off. I was ready to kill him….”I would have shot the man holding the gun,” he added.
Unbelievable.
Is it possible that Loughner had been threatening other legislators than Giffords? According to KGO TV in San Francisco, investigators in the Arizona case have contacted a California State Senator, Leland Yee about threats he received after criticizing Sarah Palin in 2010.
Detectives investigating the shooting of U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona last weekend are considering a connection to California Sen. Leland Yee, who received death threats for criticizing former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin last year.
It’s not clear what connection Arizona authorities suspect.
Yee’s spokesman Adam Keigwin….said Yee’s office received threats relevant to Giffords’ investigation in April 2010, when the senator helped reveal that officials at California State University, Stanislaus shredded documents related to Palin’s contract fees as a keynote speaker.
During the incident, students dug through a trash bin outside a campus administration building and found a shredded contract with a speaker who required first-class air travel from Anchorage, Alaska.
Yee chided the university in news reports, and in response, several voice, text and graphic threats were sent to his office.
Here’s a Huffpo article from April that give details on the threats.
You’ve probably heard that one of the survivors of the shooting, Eric Fuller, blames right wingers like Beck, Angle, and Palin for Loughner’s rampage. You can watch an interview with him at Democracy Now.
Tonight there’s news that Fuller tried to visit Loughner’s parents at home.
Suffering from a bullet-wound to the knee, Fuller got out of his car and limped to the door. He said he decided to stop by on the way to a doctor’s appointment.
“So I thought I’d come over here and try to forgive them,” he said. “I know that sounds crazy.”
He sounds really traumatized. It’s kind of scary to think of what these survivors face in a place like Arizona where there may not be a lot of public health support to help them deal with what they are going through. They really need to be in touch with each other in some kind of therapy group situation, IMHO. On the other hand, the police might not like that, because they could end up getting their stories mixed up.
Police have released a timeline of Loughner’s activities leading up to the shootings.
NPR has an article on “The Other, Better Arizona” by Jeff Biggers
I’d love to read some good news, but I haven’t been able to find any. If you have any, feel free to post links in this thread.
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